#42

Anything that happens, happens.
Anything that, in happening, causes something else to happen, causes something else to happen.
Anything that, in happening, causes itself to happen again, happens again.
It doesn’t necessarily do it in chronological order, though.
       ~ Douglas Adams

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Most people do not comprehend,
[no matter how] they encounter such things,
nor do they understand what they learn;
they believe only themselves.
       ~ Heraclitus

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Every thought is a seed.
If you plant crab apple, don’t count on harvesting Golden Delicious.
      ~ Bill Meyer

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All the lessons of history in four sentences:
Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad with power.
The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small.
The bee fertilizes the flower it robs.
When it is dark enough, you can see stars.

       ~ Charles A. Beard

In the spirit of Thirty and Thirty-Five comes the following awesome, beautiful, and creative web of thoughts that occupy my brain.

No matter.

I’m not patient enough to write poetry or prose, so I’ll just count down after Futurama.

Don’t you worry about life, the universe, and everything; let me worry about blank…

42. We believe in the interconnectedness of all things.

41. Everything is about inclusion.

40. Everything is everythang.

39. Truth is, everybody is going to hurt you; you just gotta find the ones worth suffering for.

38. As human beings, our greatest glory consists not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.

37. Let it go. This too shall pass.

36. SIMPLIFY.

35. Lessons are repeated until they are learned.

34. The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.

33. Reflect on happiness.

32. People are very bad at predicting what will make us happy.

31. There are shortcuts to happiness, and dancing is one of them.

30. We are feedback loops. We are the stories we tell ourselves.

29. Love is when you open your heart to pain.

28. To get over grief, be there for someone else’s grief.

27. Kittie heaven is mousie hell.

26. Bird is the word!

25. The ride does not require an explanation. Just occupants.

24. It’s not going to stop till you wise up.

23. Character is destiny.

22. Reflection creates identity.

21.
You can do anything.

20. We can change the world with a pen and paper. We keep waiting, waiting.

19. Starting is hard.

18. We’ll see.

17. Life is… delicious ambiguity.

16. Beware drift. Do what you love!

15. True happiness comes from within.

14. Get yourself a giant panda! (Super kawaii!)

13. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.

12. That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.

11. It goes to 11. (Be sure to read through to Andy Weir’s story, “The Egg”!)

10. Life is like business. It’s 20 percent what happens to you, and 80 percent how you respond.

9. 80 percent of success is showing up.

8. Our attitudes produce our luck.

7. Love more, fear less.

6. Be grateful for every breath.

5. Be who you are, as hard as you can.

4. Be here now.

3. Be excellent.

2. There is no way to happiness. Happiness is the way.

1. Only kindness matters in the end.

********* …enlightenment… *********

 

 

There is no way to happiness. Happiness is the way.

Being happy does not mean everything is perfect;
it means you decide to see beyond the imperfections.

Remember the words of Winston Churchill, who said,

I like things to happen;
And if they don’t happen,
I like to make them happen.

But here is the exception: there is no way to happiness.

Happiness is the way, meditated Thich Nhat Hanh.

We breathe and connect the words of Nathaniel Hawthorne…

Happiness is a butterfly,

which when pursued,

is always just beyond your grasp,

but which,

if you will sit down quietly,

may alight upon you.

A butterfly flies with the magnetic appeal of a meaningful life…

People searching for a purpose in life — whether or not they are consciously aware of this deep-seated desire — will be attracted to others who have arrived at an answer.

And so we answer questions and question answers on Quora, in a neverending process of continual improvement…

• What defines happiness?
• What is the way to happiness?
• What is the concrete way to happiness?
• Why are successful people the happiest?
• What are some worthy goals to pursue in life?
• How can you maximize your happiness in life?
• What are life’s lessons from Amazon’s Jeff Bezos?
• Why are we drawn to those who have found meaning?
• What is the meaning of life?

Meditating ten essential reflections on happiness, we know that to be happy we have to want to be happy.

And that whoever is happy will make others happy, too…

Because the head is an overstated organ;
all of the action happens in the heart.

We breathe and reflect about happiness and kindness…

• Be kind, for everyone is fighting a hard battle.
• Only kindness matters in the end.

Never get so busy making a living,
that you forget to make a life.

And remember, there is no way to happiness.
Happiness is the way.

And once more, with feeling: SIMPLIFY.

Whales and Lobsters: Facebook and Twitter and CASH, oh my!

It’s been a month since I wrote Pandas and Lobsters, and I’m ready to delve further.

Specifically, the “social interest graph” — Pages & Likes — is so money, and most people don’t even know it yet. 

Whales and Lobsters are the foundation of social networks, and Facebook is a machine for turning Whales into CASH. Let’s explore why, and the implications…

The hype around this week’s launch of Facebook Places is misguided. Facebook Places are not about check-ins; they’re about making millions of new Facebook Pages that are monetizable. Foursquare is a sideshow; Twitter is currently Facebook’s main competition for public, lurkable, searchable, transactable Pages for brands. If someone asks why Facebook wants to be in local Pages, echo the immortal words attributed to bank robber Willie Sutton: “Because that’s where the money is.“

To understand why, we once again zoomorphize the Facebook population:

Lobsters are individuals with Facebook Profiles. Facebook is a lobster trap and your friends are the bait. A lobster has a ganglia-brain the size of a grasshopper’s, and no attention span, so frankly the most useful thing it can do is get laid. Male lobsters try to mate with almost every other female in the area, which makes male lobsters very annoying. Collectively they are the reason why Facebook has more pageviews than the next 99 biggest websites combined.

Whales are brands with Facebook Pages. Brands encompass both individuals and businesses. Facebook Profiles are painfully unusable for Whales because in general they have more friends, fans, and followers to interact with than an individual with Facebook’s tools can reasonably manage. If how Facebook makes CASH is the question, whales are the answer. Whales are the lifeblood of Facebook financially: they are the brands who in aggregate pay more than $1 billion annually to Facebook, Inc., to advertise their Facebook Pages and collect more fans for those Pages via billions of daily LIKE buttons.

Whales and Lobsters are the foundation of social networks, and Facebook is a machine for turning Whales into CASH. Whales create and share publically, and pay actual CASH; Lobsters consume privately, and occasionally LIKE and comment publically, and pay attention (and time). In the best social networks this creates a virtuous cycle: Celebrities and artists interact with fans, while businesses and organizations interact with customers, and social networks allow the Whales to build deeper relationships with their fans and customers. And vice versa. LIKE a palindrome. LIKE, totally.

A click’s just a click, but a LIKE is a LEAD. Ongoing relationships are the key difference between the mere clicks Google advertisers pay for and the potentially-interactive LIKEs Facebook advertisers pay for. AdWords and AdSense account for 99% of Google’s profit. This is why Google has taken notice (though someone should point out to Google that Like.com has nothing to do with all the billions of daily LIKE buttons they see on the Open Web).

Facebook has only 3 million Whales — Branded Individual and Business Pages — that collectively represent only 5.3 billion clicks of the LIKE button thus far. Facebook by the Numbers hides this fact behind all the statistics about the 500 million Lobsters: the average Facebook user LIKEs fewer than 10 Facebook Pages (divide 5.3 billion by 500 million). And you have to look very carefully to realize that most of the total 5.3 billion LIKEs were unpaid or forced conversions.

Since Whales and LIKEs are essential to Facebook’s revenues, the race is on to win the minds and hearts of Whales and the Lobsters who LIKE them. Facebook may look like Winner Takes All presently, but that’s because Twitter hasn’t really entered the market of charging Whales for LIKEs… yet. Now you may ask yourself: how many Whales and LIKEs does Twitter actually have? It’s a good question because Twitter is pretty tight-lipped about these numbers. But I can guess.

Twitter currently has at least 10 million Whales, and more cu
stomers are willing to FOLLOW something than LIKE it. That’s wild speculation on my part; 10 million comes from Twitter Counter and Twitter’s Lobster count is over 190 million users; with more than 65 million tweets a day, I have no idea how many FOLLOWs the Twitter Whales collectively represent, but anecdotally I know more friends who are willing to FOLLOW things than LIKE things. Facebook gets 20 million LIKEs a day. Whatever the actual number of FOLLOWs a day is, it’s clear from recent WTF features (and their WTF ilk) that Twitter wants to accelerate FOLLOWs sooner rather than later.

Why are Facebook Places so important? 1.5 million Facebook Pages are local businesses, and Facebook needs more Pages. Since almost every celebrity, artist, and global business already has a Facebook Page, local businesses are pretty much the only way for Facebook to increase its lucrative Whale count. So much for the open versus privacy tradeoff: Facebook Places are Facebook Pages, and Facebook Pages are too money to be private. That Facebook also gets to stomp on Google Places only makes it more delicious, but mark my words: Facebook is fighting Twitter for mindshare with the Whales who pay them CASH.

Why do Whales LIKE to pay Facebook? FOLLOW the CASH. My friend Winston, a local business owner in Palo Alto, told me recently that he had little faith in Yelp, FourSquare, Groupon, or even Google Places to move the needle on his business. You heard me: 300k groupons can be wrong because no local business is The Gap. What did he think worked? His Facebook Page. Why? Because he could easily see how many users had visited the Page each day, and the age-sex-location of those users.

Even though Winston received no data about conversion rates and offered no special deals — his Facebook Page, like most, is almost entirely a Placeholder — he zeroed in on the fundamental truth of all brand advertising: that eventually numbers of local eyeballs will convert to local business. The thing that pleased him was simply being able to see the numbers of eyeballs entering the funnel at the top. Facebook’s success is really as simple as being the first business to offer that data visually with such ease of use. Even Foursquare knows that “local businesses love this stuff.“

Now, the early bird gets the worm. The early worm gets… eaten. Is Facebook the annelid in the New Whale Order? Yes, if Twitter can learn enough about what Facebook offers its Whales in exchange for CASH — with the LIKEs and the age-sex-location demographics and the pretty pictures that illustrate funnels. We’re not talking about fixing the unusable mess that is Twitter search or developing the rocket science that is Google Analytics. We’re talking something much simpler and emotionally satisfying than anything Google can provide: Local businesses using the Web to build relationships with their customers. Tweet, and your customers tweet with you; Google, and you Google alone.

My guess is that Twitter already knows everything I just said, and is quietly employing Lesson #4, Part 3: keep your mouth shut.

No wonder Twitter is so… quietly nonchalant. Look carefully, and you’ll see in their eyes the kind of calm that comes from knowing something profound that others are only beginning to wrap their heads around…

The ride does not require an explanation. Just occupants.

~The idea is to remain in a state of constant departure while always arriving. Saves on introductions and good-byes. The ride does not require an explanation. Just occupants.~ [Waking Life]

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(thanks Anja!)

Eleven Essential Reflections On Happiness…

Wow.

That may have been the sweetest ending of a World Cup game I have ever watched.

You can watch the highlights on your favorite Interweb site, but they won’t really give you the feeling of 90 minutes of tense, do-or-die buildup , culminating in a super charged score in the final minute that propelled Team USA from elimination into first place in their group!

****** I am “Snoopy Dance happy” !!! ******

But I realize this is a temporary happiness that comes from adrenaline and other juices pumping through my headmeats. Soon that rush will subside, and I will go back to reflecting my baseline happiness.

Simply put, happiness is the way.

And happiness comes from within.

Which brings us back to one of the main characteristics that defines being and becoming and the gap in between them: HAPPINESS.

Note that we are not talking about absence of pain; we’re talking presence of happiness.

A hundred days ago I created this ifindkarma posterous because bakadesuyo inspired me with his. I love to read what he writes, and in particular I love when he reflects about subjects such as happiness.

If I had to distill all of bakadesuyo’s happiness musings into essential reflections, here are the key takeaways I’ve internalized… so far…

10. Happiness is increased by how much you make and lowered by how much you want.

9. Happiness is a feedback loop, not just internally but also through others.

8. So be careful who you choose as spouse, friends, and neighbors.

7. Relative wealth is more important than actual wealth when it comes to how happy you are.

6. Giving makes us happier than receiving. Outcomes trump incomes in making us happy.

5. Happy people tend to love their jobs; jobs do not, by themselves, make people happy.

4. We’re bad at realizing how good we are at adapting to circumstances.

3. When distilled to its essence, happiness is a simple process.

2. To be happy, focus on what you have, and not on what you don’t.

1. There are still many unanswered questions when it comes to happiness.

Which brings me back to me. If I had to distill all of my happiness musings into eleven essential reflections, here are the key takeaways I’ve externalized… so far…

11. Read these musings, especially the one you’re reading right now. Reflect! Repeat!!! 🙂

10. There is no way to happiness. Happiness is the way.

9. People are very bad at predicting what will make them happy.

8. Our attitudes produce our luck.

7. Most success comes from being present.

6. Reflection helps us be here now.

5. There are shortcuts to happiness, and dancing is one of them.

4. There are shortcuts to happiness, and breathing is one of them.

3. Happiness is interconnected to all things.

2. Happiness comes from what we want to include, not from what we want to avoid.

1. When it comes to happiness, lessons are repeated until they are learned.

And if all else fails, take a step back, breathe, think about a kitten wearing a tiny hat eating a tiny ice cream cone, and regroup. For tomorrow is another day, and we cannot waste today’s time cluttering up tomorrow’s opportunities with yesterday’s troubles.

Kitten. Tiny hat. Tiny ice cream cone. NOW!!!

Raindrops on roses and tiny hats on kittens aside, I want to take a moment or two to thank Jennifer Aaker and Gretchen Rubin and Tony Hsieh and Niki Leondakis and Caterina Fake for driving me to keep reflecting on happiness as I walk the earth. The tension between being and becoming has become more than an avocation for me… it’s something I’d love to work into my vocation, someday, someway. It is love incarnate.

Love is the condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.

To empower other people to find their own happiness, to me, is tantamount to enabling the childhood dreams of others.

There is no greater job than enabling the childhood dreams of others.

Read. Reflect. Repeat.

We conclude this tapestry with a trinity of TED talks that reflect on happiness: Tony Robbins on why we do what we do (emotion!) and how we can do it better (focus!); Barry Schwartz on the paradox of choice; and Dan Gilbert on why we are or are not happy:

(Cc: @Bakadesuyo @Aaker @GretchenRubin @Zappos @Niki_Leondakis @Caterina) 🙂 🙂 🙂

Be here now.

Michelle Geromel posted,

“Dear friend,

Not even I know how a dream will come true, until it does.

But if you just keep showing up, they always do.

Big-Love-Hug,
~The Universe” (source: tut.com)

I told her that being present is challenging because life has so many “be here now” distractions. To which she responded…

Whenever she feels scattered, she looks in the mirror and asks herself where she is.

Sometimes she has to ask herself a few times to bring herself back to the present, but it always works:

1. Breathe.
2. Let go.
3. Reflect.

 

Reflection always works…

Perhaps that’s why reflection creates identity…

To be here now, engage your reflection.

“Find joy and peace in this very moment.”

Be grateful for every breath.

Life is… delicious ambiguity.

Character is destiny. Everything will be okay in the end. So…

Whenever you are knocked down, get up.

Simplify.

We close this note with a score of reflections over the last month, reflected in my statuses on Facebook and Twitter…

“Love is the condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.” ~ Robert Heinlein (via Ashley Merkut)

“Stop thinking about life and start living it.” ~ @PauloCoelho (via @IlzeSuna)

“Truth is, everybody is going to hurt you. You just gotta find the ones worth suffering for…” ~ Bob Marley (via me)

“The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook.” (via Teresa Pedraza)

“Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes.” ~ Walt Whitman (via Altaire Gural)

“Life gives answers in three ways… It says Yes and gives you what you want; it says No and gives you something better; it says Wait and gives you the Best!” (via @IlzeSuna)

“If we wait for the moment when everything, absolutely everyt
hing is ready, we shall never begin.” ~ Ivan Turgenev (via Persia Pele)

“If everything seems under control — you’re just not going fast enough.” ~ Mario Andretti (via Marianne Borenstein)

“I am a professional guitar player. People pay me to stop.” ~ Bob Cleveland (via me)

“Sue Sylvester has hourly flare-ups of burning, itchy, highly contagious talent…” ~ GLEE (via @AmyKeefe)

“Twitter is really going through a detox right now, and it’s trying to get some of the toxins out of its system.” ~ Michael Abbott (via the Merc, still doing better than Yahoo)

“Violence is never the answer, unless the question is, ‘What is never the answer?'” ~ Cleveland Brown (via me)

“Every time you smile at someone, it is an action of love, a gift to that person, a beautiful thing.” ~ Mother Teresa (via @IlzeSuna)

“It is not difficult to love good people. It is difficult to love people as they are.” ~ Juris Rubenis (via @IlzeSuna)

“Death is not sad; the sad thing is that most people don’t really live at all.” ~ Peaceful Warrior (via Amie Valenzuela)

“Goodbyes are not forever. Goodbyes are not the end. They simply mean I’ll miss you Until we meet again!” (via @IlzeSuna)

“Even if you work hard and make wise choices, you still need a little luck. Never forget.” (via me)

“Worry is wasting today’s time to clutter up tomorrow’s opportunities with yesterday’s troubles.” (via Faith Thomas)

“Find joy and peace in this very moment.” ~ Thich Nhat Hanh (via @NikiConnor)

“the yogic breath (in thru the nose, out thru the mouth) in sanskrit is ‘ham sa’ which means ‘that i am‘… beautiful…” (via samantha graham)

“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.” ~ Anne Frank (via thedogs.com)

“Ancie
nt master says: If you like everything, then you like nothing. But if you love everything, you have the world.” ~ Kurt Thams

“Three things in human life are important: The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.” ~ Henry James

 

I should invest in a luck factory. I’d make a fortune!

I got a decent amount of replies for the tweet??…

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Even if you work hard and make wise choices, you still need a little luck. Never forget that.

…but unfortunately then I tweeted about Google which got retweeted and commented on many times, and all of the replies I got on Twitter got lost in a cacophony of random chirping.

My lovely little stream of replies and was flooded with a barrage of randomness, and now whatever conversations I might have had on Twitter about the role of luck are gone.

I could look for those replies, but searching Twitter is like drinking an ipecac martini.

At least Facebook keeps the thread intact…

Even if you have a little luck, you still need to work hard and make wise choices. Never forget that.

…but Facebook keeps diluting the stream so that thread keeps getting pushed down. Which is bad luck for me if I want to find that conversation six months from now.

Hey Facebook, I don’t piss in your swimming pool so stop crapping in my stream!

Is it bad luck that Twitter and Facebook make it so that we never step in the same stream twice, making it futile to see where we used to be? No, that’s by design. My bad luck in losing a potentially great conversation about luck was intentionally caused by the way Twitter and Facebook design streams. Or, put another way:

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Some things attributed to bad luck are actually the consequence of design.

…which makes me wonder how many things I call bad luck are actually caused by someone else intentionally. Sometimes I feel like bad luck is the only luck I have. Maybe it’s my perception that’s off. Maybe it’s my attitude that needs adjusting.

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Yeah, I think that luck would make me happy, but would happiness bring me luck?

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Which brings us to the role of attitude in luck.

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If 80% of success is showing up, then how much of luck is a decent attitude?

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In all likelihood, a lot.

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Richard Wiseman says,

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Only about 10% of life is purely random. The remaining 90% is defined by the way we think. Our attitudes produce our luck.

I read that and think to myself: Still, there’s that remaining 10%, and that’s the part we need EVEN if we work hard and make wise choices.

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Business idea: figure out how to manufacture luck, and make a fortune. Which is where we started:

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I should invest in a luck factory. I’d make a fortune!

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In the meantime, I’m going to make it a habit to hang out with people who are lucky. My father used to tell me that people with good luck are contagious — as are people with bad luck! He would affirm daily:

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Avoid the unlucky, the unethical, and the unhappy.

So make it a habit to spend time with lucky people… and affirm!!!

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We believe in the interconnectedness of all things.

“We are feedback loops; we are the stories we tell ourselves…”
~ Doc Jensen on LOST  

“He who wonders discovers that this in itself is wonder…”
~ M.C. Escher

In the beginning, there was nothing but darkness. We all were one.

And then we said, “Oh hai, Let there be light.“

And then we LOOK closer and more carefully. We could see that there was nothing. Which is a funny thing to say because sometimes words are inadequate, and sometimes words have two meanings.

And then expansion started… Wait!

And we added things. And the universe expanded. And we added more things. And the universe kept expanding to accommodate adding more things. And everything was awesome. Fundamentally.

It might seem like everything was added randomly. And perhaps that is the case. But that’s not what we believe.

We believe in the interconnectedness of all things.

This idea was kept in the dark for billions of years. Instead, the reigning belief was detachment: “I don’t really want to know how your garden grows, ’cause I just want to fly.” And so, we lived forever…

…and life was but a dream. Edgar Allan Poe waxed poetic, “All that we see or seem… is but a dream within a dream.” (Thanks Ankita!)

And we thought about the words of Rumi…

“We come spinning out of nothingness, scattering stars like dust.“

“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.“

“The face of the unknown, hidden beyond the universe would appear on the mirror of your

perception.“

“They say there is a doorway from heart to heart, but what is the use of a door when there are no walls?“

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there.“

And the Primitive Radio Gods whispered quietly in the corner…

Am I alive, or thoughts that drift away?

Does summer come for everyone?

Can humans do what prophets say?

If I die before I learn to speak,

can money pay for all the days

I lived awake but half-asleep?

Suddenly we woke up with a kick. And we were no longer detached when we woke up with the idea. Not to spoil Inception, but merely to praise Inception:

“What’s the most resilient parasite? An idea. A single idea from the human mind can build cities. An idea can transform the world and rewrite all the rules.“

For our idea, Douglas Adams offered enlightenment. Specifically, Dirk Gently illuminated us.

I’m very glad you asked me that, Mrs Rawlinson. The term `holistic’ refers to my conviction that what we are concerned with here is the fundamental interconnectedness of all things. I do not concern myself with such petty things as fingerprint powder, telltale pieces of pocket fluff and inane footprints. I see the solution to each problem as being detectable in the pattern and web of the whole. The connections between causes and effects are often much more subtle and complex than we with our rough and ready understanding of the physical world might naturally suppose, Mrs Rawlinson. Let me give you an example. If you go to an acupuncturist with toothache he sticks a needle instead into your thigh. Do you know why he does that, Mrs Rawlinson? No, neither do I, Mrs Rawlinson, but we intend to find out. A pleasure talking to you, Mrs Rawlinson. Goodbye. 

    — Douglas Adams, Dirk Gentley’s Holistic Detective Agency

And then Tim Berners-Lee — or was it Dan Connolly? — distilled the words to their essence:

We believe in the interconnectedness of all things.

And then Jamie Zawinski reflected on the Vannevar Bush-influenced words of Ted Nelson:

Intertwingularity is not generally acknowledged —
people keep pretending they can make things deeply hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can’t.

Everything is deeply intertwingled.

And then the Internet developed its own connective tissue. Which itself is unsearchable.

And then I couldn’t believe what happened next. Free association. Say what? We’ll see.

And then there we were, all in one place, a generation lost in the fundamental inteconnectedness of all things, spinning in infinity. The eleventh dimension. The ten dimensions of reality. Pandas and lobsters. Insults. FFF numbers. Facebook grief. How the web was won. The search party. Google takes all. Cell 13 and the Thinking Machine. Penguins of destiny. Whales are the answer. Squid vs unicorn. Puking rainbows. The sky is blue. The World Wide Web. Conversations. Trilogies. Peripeteia. Jenny Holzer. It’s the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine). Pause, to part the Red Sea…

…continuing. LOOK. We didn’t start the fire. America, fuck yeah. Freedom isn’t free. Terrible Disney lessons. The virus of faith. 2000″ TV. You’re the man now, dawg. Blue ball machine. Facebook is a lobster trap, and your friends are the bait. True happiness comes from within. It comes back to you, you’re gonna get what you deserve… lovin’ is what I got, remember that. The ride does not require an explanation, just occupants. Imitation of life. Noah’s photos. I’m expressin’ with my full capabilities, now I’m living in correctional facilities. Now let me welcome everybody to the wild wild west… California love… Regulators!!! I want it all: brand new socks and drawers. Why do I live this way? Heeeey, must be the money! Alright stop, collaborate and listen. How can I find a woman like that? Guitar: impossible. French bulldogs. OMG pwnies. Ready, set, bag. Speak with me. Meditate. Mediate. Kick. Things that make you go hmmm. Show me how to dance. Alejandro. Ra ra ra ah ah ah roma ro ma ma gaga ooh la la. Cameron Diaz dances. Stephen Hawking rocks. Time travel is horrifying. Outer space sucks. Crumbling cities. Pink houses. Iconic bras. Mad men. Ah, l’amour. Disney perversions. Episode 200. And 201. Freedom. Unconscious trumps free will. Disney deaths. Serial killers. Corporate slogans. At-at. Canned unicorn meat. What if you’re wrong? The purpose of purpose. The empathetic civilization. Emma Bates. Qualia. Reid Hoffman. Hegel’s philosophy of history. The unexplainable. Time-traveling brandy thieves. Life on Mars. LOST. The Little Prince.

I love The Little Prince. Whi
ch reminds me of some of my favorite words that Robbye Bentley has posted recently…

“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“I will love the light for it shows me the way, yet I will endure the darkness because it shows me the stars.” ~ Og Mandino

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

“Life and Jah are one in the same. Jah is the gift of existence. I am in some way eternal, I will never be duplicated. The singularity of every man and woman is Jah’s gift. What we struggle to make of it is our sole gift to Jah. The process of what that struggle becomes, in time, the Truth.” ~ Bob Marley

“We are not human beings on a spiritual journey. We are spiritual beings on a human journey.” ~ Stephen Covey

Thank you, Robbye. I have some favorites of my own, too.

The words of Rumi echo in eternity, “The face of the unknown, hidden beyond the universe would appear on the mirror of your perception.”

Walt Whitman whispered, “Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes.”

Which takes me full circle…

“Three things in human life are important: The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.” ~ Henry James

“Truth is, everybody is going to hurt you; you just gotta find the ones worth suffering for…” ~ Bob Marley

“I believe that everything happens for a reason. People change so that you can learn to let go, things go wrong so that you appreciate them when they’re right. You believe lies so you eventually learn to trust no one but yourself, and sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together.” ~ Marilyn Monroe

“If success or failure of the planet and of human beings depended on how I am and what I do… How would I be? What would I do?” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

“We are all connected to each other, in a circle, in a hoop that never ends. How high can the sycamore grow? If you cut it down, then you’ll never know…” ~ Colors of the Wind

So it goes.

And Scott Adams said, “The best you can hope for in this life is that your delusions are benign and your compulsions have utility.”

So it goes…

 

And then a lot of peoples’ brains exploded. Such is rock n roll.

And then we rested. Or at least, we tried to relax and breathe and reflect…

And dream of no more “and thens”. And butterfly effects.

And appreciate that nothing can ever be truly, fully understood. Seriously.

At that point, when all are one and one is all…
Remember to be a rock and not to roll.

Still, three fundamental questions remain:

1. If everything is everythang, are being and becoming just limited beings’ perspective of the oneness?
2. If happiness is part of the oneness, why is it so difficult to be here now and connect to that happiness?
3. If lessons are repeated until they are learned, is learning just finding the right connection to the oneness?

And are there things we can never learn? We’ll see.

If some connections cannot be made, perhaps there is no spoon at all.

If Internet is the substrate for interconnectedness of all things, perhaps The Architect knows.

And are there things that cannot be taught? Richard Feynman refuses to explain how magnets work. Feynman concludes, I really can’t do a good job, any job, of explaining magnetic force in terms of something else you’re more familiar with, because I don’t understand it in terms of anything else you’re more familiar with.

Breathing is neither learned nor taught. It just is. And yet sometimes we must remember to breathe. And to be here now. And to be grateful for every breath.

And then when that gratitude gets us reflecting about the meaning of life, we learn to let it go; this too shall pass…

It’s one who won’t be taken, that cannot seem to give, and the soul afraid of dying that never learns to live, sang Bette Midler.

So it goes.

Savor every second; enjoy every sandwich, as the dying Warren Zevon put it.

So it goes.

You need to live before you die, said Steve Jobs…

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have
to trust in something, your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.“

So it goes…

It is through death, too, that we make a connection with Randy Pausch… Con te partiro.

In the end, there is no greater job than enabling the childhood dreams of others.

And in the end, everything will be okay. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.

And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.

And in the end, only kindness matters.

So we dance. And LOOK. And simplify. And reflect. And breathe.

Which takes us back to the beginning.

And then… Bazinga!

Be grateful for every breath.

Samantha Graham wrote to me today because I was down about the death last week and funeral tomorrow of a loved one, and how grateful I am to be alive. Sam texted:

Be grateful for every breath you take!

The yogic breath … when you breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth … in Sanskrit is ‘ham sa‘ … which literally means ‘that I am‘ …

Beautiful.

Breathe deeply, with cleansing, soothing breaths…

When I say “that I am”, I hear “be here now“…

Sam continued:

In Sanskrit the meaning of Om is avati or raksati. It is used as a symbol that must be revisited to be learned.

Raksati means ‘one who protects, sustains‘.

Om is the name of the lord who is everything.

How do we connect with everything? We’ll see.

 

Jai guru deva om… 

 

Meditate…

By the way, this is the first posterous post I’ve composed entirely on the Sprint Evo phone. I wrote it sitting on a porch in southwestern Virginia where cell coverage is roamy but 3G coverage is decent! Thank you Sprint Evo. That it is. Beautiful.

Is all of LOST about letting go and moving on?

I’m reflecting about The End??of LOST.

Doc Jensen’s??first reactions??and??full writeup??make me??wonder if all of LOST is about reflection, the central concerns of life, and redemption.

The characters are LOST souls, not quite sure about their identities and uncertain about where they’re going.

Through the LOST journey they learn not only who they are but also??how to let go, which is the key to moving on.

These are the themes of my favorite Doc Jensen columns, for “we are feedback loops; we are the stories that we tell ourselves“…

??

Doc Jensen on reflection:??

??

“Reflection creates identity.“

Doc Jensen on the central concerns of life:

??

“When I started watching??Lost, I found myself more intrigued by the mysteries than the characters. Over time, though, I have become more moved by the themes and the redemption struggles. In the third season, my engagement with??Lost??changed completely. I???ve previously shared how my wife???s cancer affected the way I processed the show and expressed myself about the show.

I began to see??Lost??not as a mystery to be solved, but an allegory for living in a state of profound, unsettling ambiguity that dealt with the central concerns of life. Why are we here? Why do we suffer? Is there hope? Do we accept our fate or fight it? What happens to us when we die? Will we see our loved ones again after death?

I appreciated that??Lost??ruminated on these questions.”

Doc Jensen on learning from the past:

??

“Jacob seemed to think that the broken people and damaged souls who came to the Island would embrace the opportunity of a fresh start and naturally blossom into the super-Buddha he was looking for. And why not? As Jacob told Richard, the Island is a place where ???the past doesn???t matter.??? But what he realized is that people have a really hard time letting go of the past. I might also argue that people??shouldn???t??let go of the past; at the very least, we can???t let it rule us, but we do need it to learn from it.“

Doc Jensen on letting go:

??

“Mother, Jacob, and Man-in-Black were contemporaries with Guatama (also Siddhartha) Buddha, who lived from 580-480 BC. The core ideas of Buddhism include the idea of letting go of the things of this world that keep us from recognizing and growing our spiritual nature
and reincarnation and evolution of consciousness through a myriad of lifetimes.”

Ultimately, we should reflect, but we shouldn’t overthink it. LOST, after all, was created by the man with??the mystery box.

??

P.S. — In an odd??synchronicity, congrats to Bret Michaels for winning Celebrity Apprentice. That just happened to happen simultaneously with the ending of LOST. Life goes on, so enjoy this one-minute re-enactment of??LOST using cats.

??

??

??

Still LOST? Let go. Move on. Be here now.

Fuck iPhone. I’m gettin’ an Evo!

Evo will be the greatest phone in 2010. It’s great for phone calls and Gmail and texting and watching high-definition videos and surfing the Internet, and has a pair of incredible cameras for photos/video, a blazingly fast processor, a freakin’ sweet way to play videos from the Internet on your television, a kickstand,??20k applications, and a mobile wifi hotspot application that will let me connect up to eight laptops and devices to the Internet through wifi. It’s the phone that I have been waiting for.

??

My bad romance with iPhone ends with me giving up on iPhone??and asking myself, Will it blend?

??

So on June 4, I will end my AT&T contract and make the Evo my primary phone.

??

However, I’m not a fan of the Sprint marketing for Evo: America’s First 4G Phone.

??

BORING.??Sounds like something that makes Ke$ha say Blah blah blah. Well guess what AT&T? The fools in town are on our side. And we’re writing marketing copy!

??

My proposal for the new Sprint marketing slogan substitutes subtlety for in-your-face attitude.

??

Fuck iPhone.??I’m gettin’ an Evo!

??

It’s short, bold, and to the point. Evo shall set us free from the shackles of AT&T.

??

??

Don’t be jealous. Ok, be just a little bit jealous.

??

??

Evo. Anything less is Blah Blah Blah.

Evo. End your Bad Romance with iPhone.

??

iPhone, I don’t wanna be friends! You are an AppHole. Buh-bye!

Lessons are repeated until they are learned.

Today’s lessons are about happiness in life. And every day is today. So simplify. And dance. And reflect. And stop, collaborate and listen.

“Whoever is happy will make others happy, too.” I couldn’t find the true source of this quote, which has been attributed to Mark Twain at times, Anne Frank at other times. In any case, I believe it.

There is no way to happiness. Happiness *is* the way.

I also believe that true happiness comes from within. It’s one of the most important values I have learned and continue to learn. Life, the universe, and everything regularly emphasize that lesson.

When it comes to true happiness, lessons are repeated until they are learned:

• Breathe deeply. Anyone can find happiness, writes Amy Lukima.
• The Happiness Project studied everyone from Aristotle to Oprah, and found you’re not happy unless you think you’re happy. Also, our days are long but the years are short, says Gretchen Rubin.
• Happiness is all around us, if we take time to see. Riding the bus changes your perspective, says Snob on a Bus blogger Jacki Carr.
• If life is a game, these are the ten rules for being a human being, according to Chérie Carter-Scott.
  
• There are twelve things happy people do differently, according to Jacob Sokol. (Thanks seablackwithink.)
• Life is like business. It’s 20 percent what happens to you, and 80 percent how you choose to react.
• Nothing stays the same. Life regularly changes things up on you. Stroke of insight is Jill Bolte Taylor‘s inspiring TED Talk about starting over.
• Got all that? Great. Now roll up your sleeves for some lessons on how to quickly and easily improve your life, an anthology of lessons from my favorite posterous author, Eric Barker.

I am certain I will return to these lessons — and to this web page! — many, many times in my life and in my tweeting. And reflecting…

For now, just dance with Bobby McFerrin: “Don’t worry, be happy.“